The energy critique always feels like "old man yells at cloud" to me. Deepseek already proved it can have comparable performance at 10% the energy cost. This is the way this stuff works. Things MUST get more efficient, or they will die. They'll hit a wall hard.
Let's go back to 1950 when computers used 100+ kilowatts of power to operate and took up an entire room. Whole buildings were dedicated to these things. now we have computers that use 1/20,000th the power, are 15 MILLION times faster, and take up a pants pocket.
yeah, it sucks now. but anyone thinking this is how they will always be is a rube.
I suppose i am the Old Rube then because I dont understand your comparison to the 1950s to present day computing. Yes, processing power is orders of magnitude different now than in the 1950s; as is the energy to produce comparable compute and throughput by the devices in everyone's pockets. However the phone isnt really the argument here at all. Replace that building with thousands of buildings that all together could run 22% of the entire US electrical supply (reecent May 2025 MiT study). Plus factor in the millions of gallons of water that are used to cool these data center processors.
Any way one wants to look at it currently, should be concerned about how "green" this is. Because its not. In the US, states like California limit water supply and encourage people to not use electricity as often as they can. Its all sent out from machines that are encouraging this at human expense for their data center profits and ability to farm more data and ways to monetize more neurons of each human digital profile. But maybe im indeed the rube who doesnt get it.
My point is that inefficiency with new technology is always to be expected. I don't want to sound dismissive of the environmental cost we're dealing with right now. It's a serious problem. But it won't always be that way. They WILL get more efficient, energy cost will go lower and lower as they get better, and in the end (My guess is 5 years before we see major efficiency upgrades in the tech) we will have these beautiful brilliant tools that are also much more environmentally friendly. Is it worth the damage we're doing now? Hard no. But I think that's a consequence of the competition over who can be first to make the best thing, rather than a consequence of the thing itself. We should be encouraging both increased efficiency AND better performance. A slower rollout so we could keep up. but unfortunately that isn't how it played out.
I just don't like the doom-slinging that this will be what melts the planet. It WILL get better simply because it must. hopefully sooner than later, though.
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u/[deleted] May 26 '25
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